Monday, March 01, 2010

Links for 3/1/10

It's not all about getting into an overpriced four-year college. Community colleges are great at teaching the skills and knowledge people need to go out and get actual jobs. And when those jobs go away in 20 years, the same community colleges will be great at retraining those workers for the economy's next act.

Among 22-year-olds, there are 185 female college graduates for every 100 male graduates…

the college student body has been 43% male annually since 2000. If you are too lazy to do the math, this yields 133 women per 100 men; a skewed ratio for sure, but nowhere near as skewed as 185 to 100.What gives? It turns out that it’s all about the age you examine…women at that age are twice as likely to have finished college as men. Men partly catch up by age 25…

In New York, this creative definition of blight is the new central-planning model. Consultants have also cited “underutilization” in West Harlem, where the city’s Economic Development Corporation wants to take land from private owners and hand it to Columbia University for an expansion project…

the blight studies that the city and state had commissioned to justify their rapacity were “bereft of facts”—and further tainted by the fact that one blight consultant also worked for Columbia…